Manifold Greatness: The Creation and Afterlife of the King James Bible

Manifold Greatness: The Creation and Afterlife of the King James Bible, one of the Exhibitions at the Folger opened on September 23, 2011 and closed on January 16, 2012. The exhibition is at the center of an ambitious project partnering the Folger Shakespeare Library and the Bodleian Library of the University of Oxford, which recently produced a related exhibition, Manifold Greatness: Oxford and the Making of the King James Bible. After the Folger exhibition closed in January 2012, it traveled to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, which assisted in the production of the website.

Through materials from the year 1000 to 2011, Manifold Greatness: The Creation and Afterlife of the King James Bible offers a "biography" of one of the world's most famous books, the King James Bible of 1611, which marks its 400th anniversary in 2011.

Beginning with tenth-century Anglo-Saxon biblical poems, the exhibition moves swiftly to the dramatic story of the early English Bibles, for which translators sometimes risked and even lost their lives. Rare books, manuscripts, and portraits then tell the stories of the tense conference at which James I agreed to a new Bible, and the four dozen or more top English scholars who created it over several years.

A look at the centuries-long "afterlife" of their famous text in public life, literature, entertainment, and the arts takes up the second half of the display—including, among numerous other items, the Folger first edition of the King James Bible, seventeenth-century family Bibles and lavishly bound editions, Handel's Messiah (based largely on the King James Bible), King James Bibles owned by Frederick Douglass and Elvis Presley, and the voices of the Apollo 8 astronauts as they read verses from Genesis on Christmas Eve 1968 as they orbited the Moon.

Curation

Curators

This exhibition was co-curated by Hannibal Hamlin and Steven Galbraith.

Hannibal Hamlin, Associate Professor of English at the Ohio State University, studied English at the University of Toronto and completed his doctorate in Renaissance Studies at Yale University. Renaissance literature and culture, especially Shakespeare, Donne, the Sidneys, and Milton, the Bible as/and/in literature, metrical psalms, and lyric poetry are among his scholarly interests.

His publications include Psalm Culture and Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge, 2004), The Sidney Psalter: Psalms of Philip and Mary Sidney, co-editor (Oxford World Classics, 2009), The King James Bible after 400 Years: Literary, Linguistic and Cultural Influences, co-editor (Cambridge, 2011), along with numerous journal articles, book chapters, and reviews.

A book on the Bible in Shakespeare is Hamlin’s major current project, in support of which he has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies (a Frederick Burkhardt Fellowship), and the National Humanities Center, among other grants.

He is editor of the journal Reformation and guest editor of a forthcoming forum on Poetry and Devotion for Religion and Literature. To mark the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible he is also organized an international scholarly conference at OSU in May 2011.

Steven Galbraith the Folger Shakespeare Library’s Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Rare Books (2008–2011) and now Curator of the Cary Graphic Arts Collection at Rochester Institute of Technology, is an expert on the history of the book. He came to the Folger in 2007 from the Ohio State University Library, where he was Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts as well as a Visiting Professor of English. Prior to this he worked as a reference librarian at the University of Maine.

His publications include The Undergraduate's Companion to English Renaissance Writers and Their Web Sites (Libraries Unlimited, 2004) and articles in Reformation and Spenser Studies.

He is currently working on a critical edition of Thomas Drue’s Duchess of Suffolk, a book on Edmund Spenser’s printing history, and a textbook on rare book librarianship.

He earned his MLS from the University of Buffalo and his PhD in English Renaissance Literature from the Ohio State University.

Curators' insights

On the exhibition's opening day, September 23, 2011, the Folger interviewed the curators to get their insights into the exhibition and what they hope visitors will take away from it.

Steve Galbraith: I'd like to humanize the story for visitors. These were real people making great sacrifices—William Tyndale, an earlier Bible translator, lost his life—and it also took hard labor to produce translations. We focus, for example, on John Rainolds, who worked on the King James Bible literally on his deathbed. Then you turn the corner and come to the cultural influence of the King James Bible, and that's all about people, too—the authors, the musicians. It was a challenge to represent that, though, with items from this whole universe of examples.

Hannibal Hamlin: Yes, and how to place those examples within the cases became a question for us, too. We found ourselves putting an image of Martin Luther King, Jr., and a still of Linus from A Charlie Brown Christmas in the same case, as well as a rare Folger copy of Handel's Messiah. They're all part of this larger story of the influence of the King James Bible.

Steve Galbraith: Manifold Greatness is also the first project to bring together what our Oxford colleague Helen Moore calls the "Big Three," the three major surviving manuscript records of the translation of the King James Bible.

Hannibal Hamlin: The Big Three! That's the Epistles translation from the Lambeth Palace Library; the translator John Bois's notes (or rather, a very old copy of his notes) of some of the translators' discussions; and an annotated copy of a Bishops' Bible showing the translators' changes from that text.

Steve Galbraith: The Bishops' Bible, with words crossed out and changes made—that really shows you, word by word, the painstaking process of translation that created the King James Bible, and how it all came out of the deep education and training of those translators.

Hannibal Hamlin: The idea of a King James Bible exhibition at the Folger snowballed as we began to work with the Bodleian Library at Oxford and later with the American Library Association on the traveling panel exhibit, and when we applied for the NEH grant. As the project developed, we could see the Folger exhibition would be framed differently, that it would have a longer, broader scope, including America as well as England, and coming up to the present.

Steve Galbraith: That meant we would need to borrow some materials for the later period, in addition to the earlier items that include our own rare Folger holdings. But with the prospect of the traveling panel exhibit, it was exciting to be able to share our Folger expertise and interpretation of the subject so widely. It really struck home to me today when we met with the coordinators from the 40 libraries around the United States that will be showing the traveling panel exhibit. They were just so enthusiastic; they have so many plans for the presentations where they are. I was really overwhelmed that our work in the Folger exhibition here is going to travel to that many places and people.

Hannibal Hamlin: Part of our partnership with the Bodleian included their loans of some very early materials, too. The Anglo-Saxon manuscript from about the year 1000, the Wycliffite Bible manuscript from the 1380s—I always gravitate toward those in the first case as I walk in.

Steve Galbraith: We wanted to include a nineteenth-century American family Bible and we hadn't found the right one. Then, rather hesitantly, Hannibal mentioned his own family Bible, and (Folger exhibitions manager) Caryn Lazzuri and I loved it.

Hannibal Hamlin: It feels odd, but nice, that my family Bible is in the exhibition. I've been surprised at how interested people are in that—a family Bible of one of the curators. And there's a Capitol Hill connection; my great-great-great-grandfather was Abraham Lincoln's first vice president. We're showing the page with the record of his two marriages. People in the family had looked at the front and the back pages of the Bible before and not seen much of interest. But from working on this exhibition, I knew that there are often records in the middle, between the two Testaments. And that's what I found. I was really happy to see that this existed.

Contents of the exhibition

Manifold Greatness exhibition material

This article offers a comprehensive and descriptive list of each piece included in the exhibition.

Scholars insights on Manifold Greatness

This article offers modern scholars' insights into various items within the Manifold Greatness exhibition.

Manifold Greatness children's exhibition

Make it! Videos

Explore these videos to learn how to make ink, quill pens, quartos, and ruffs, 1611 style.

Manifold Greatness website

An extensive website, Manifold Greatness: The creation and afterlife of the King James Bible, jointly produced by the Folger Shakespeare Library and the Bodleian Library with assistance from the Harry Ransom Center, was created as both a lasting online resource and a companion project. It includes a variety of supplemental materials and interactive elements.

Additional elements

Discover answers to Frequently Asked Questions about the King James Bible or learn what separates myth from reality.

A companion blog, which follows the exhibition from March 2011 to the final traveling tour destination, provides insight into the events, artifacts, and people involved in Manifold Greatness.

Supplemental materials

Audio

The Apollo 8 astronauts

On Christmas Eve, 1968, the three Apollo 8 astronauts read aloud from the creation account in Genesis, using the King James Bible text, while in orbit around the Moon. Apollo 8 included the first lunar orbits, which meant that the astronauts were completely out of touch with Earth for 45 minutes every time their craft passed behind the Moon. By the time of the Genesis reading, the crew had circled the Moon nine times and had one more revolution to complete. A global audience estimated at half a billion heard and watched their live television broadcast, making it the most-watched broadcast in history at that time.

Lunar Module Pilot William Anders:

We are now approaching lunar sunrise, and for all the people back on Earth, the crew of Apollo 8 has a message that we would like to send to you.

"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, ‘Let there be light’: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness."

Command Module Pilot James Lovell:

"And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day. And God said, ‘Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.’ And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day."

Commander Frank Borman:

"And God said, ‘Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear’: and it was so. And God called the dry land Earth, and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good."

And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you—all of you on the good Earth.

Listen to a recording of their reading.

Video

The Manifold Greatness project marks the 400th anniversary of the 1611 King James Bible. Learn about this exciting exhibition and partnership between the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford; the Folger Shakespeare Library; and the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin.

Earlier English Bible translations not only led the way to the King James Bible, they also contributed to it. Manifold Greatness curator Steven Galbraith shares the stories of earlier translators, including John Wyclif and William Tyndale who risked their lives translating the bible into English.

How was the King James Bible created? What English Bibles came before it, and what has happened since its publication in 1611? How can we begin to assess its wide-ranging cultural influence in the four centuries that followed? Curators of the Manifold Greatness exhibitions at the Folger Shakespeare Library and the Bodleian Library at Oxford explore these and other questions in this video, called Setting the stage

As the English crown passed to rulers of different faiths, how did the kings and queens from Henry VIII to James I shape the history of Bible translation? In this video called The Crown and the Bible, curators of the Manifold Greatness exhibitions at the Folger Shakespeare Library and the Bodleian Library at Oxford, as well as other specialists, consider these and other questions.

How did the King James Bible translators go about their challenging task in the years from 1604, when King James agreed to a new English Bible, to 1611, when the King James Bible was first printed? What do we know about the day-to-day work of translation, and what special insights does it offer us into the translators' world? Watch this video, Reconstructing the process to find out.

Printing the King James Bible was a major assignment—and an expensive one—for the king's printer, Robert Barker. Learn more in this video called, Printing the book.

Watch as co-cuator Steve Galbraith demonstrates the process of printing using a model printing press at the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Co-curators Hannibal Hamlin and Steve Galbraith share some of the more well-known printing errors from early editions of the King James Bible, including the accidental substitution of Judas for Jesus (in the "Judas Bible"), the omission of an important word from the seventh commandment on adultery, and even some gender confusion in the 1611 edition.

Co-curator Hannibal Hamlin talks about perhaps the most enduring influence of the King James Bible: its language, which has inspired poems, novels, and other writings spanning four centuries and every English-speaking literary tradition.

In this video called, One book, many forms, the curators of the Manifold Greatness exhibition explore the history of the physical form of the King James Bible—including the growing popularity of illustrated editions over the centuries and the role of the King James Bible in today's digital media.

Related publications

Manifold Greatness: The Making of the King James Bible (2011), published by Bodleian Library Publishing, is a richly illustrated, accessible, and meticulous account of the creation and afterlife of the 1611 King James Bible. Edited by Helen Moore and Julian Reid, contributors include Moore and Reid, Valentine Cunningham, Steven Galbraith, Hannibal Hamlin, Diarmaid MacCulloch, Peter McCullough, Judith Maltby, Christopher Rowland, and Elizabeth Solopova.

Related programs

Talks and Screenings at the Folger

• KJV in the USA: The King’s Bible in a Country without a King, Jill Lepore, September 29, 2011
• Robert Pinsky, Reading for the O.B. Hardison Poetry Series, October 4, 2011
• Poetics and the Bible, December 16, 2011

Folger Theatre

• Othello, October 18 – December 14, 2011

Folger Consort

• Early Music Seminar, A New Song: Celebrating the 400th Anniversary of the King James Bible, Wednesday, September 28, 2011
• A New Song: Celebrating the 400th Anniversary of the King James Bible, September 30 – October 2, 2011. Recording available through CD Baby
• Selections From Handel's Messiah: Recorded Live December 20-23, 1993, available for free download through CD Baby.

Conferences

• The King James Bible and Its Cultural Afterlife, The Ohio State University, May 5–7, 2011
• Anglo-American History of the KJV, Folger Institute, September 29 – October 1, 2011

Traveling exhibition

A traveling panel exhibition, inspired by the Folger exhibition and produced by the Folger in partnership with the American Library Association (ALA) toured 40 sites throughout the United States from 2011 through the summer of 2013.

• Read blog posts about the various tour locations.
• Watch videos from host sites for the traveling exhibition including lectures by experts, events, exhibits, and more.
• View a Flickr photostream of images from events and exhibitions from various tour locations.

Suggestions for further reading and research

This bibliography is not meant to be comprehensive, but is meant to lead the interested reader to some of the many resources on the King James Bible.

The following finding aids were prepared by the Folger Shakespeare Library and the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin, to suggest some of the rare resources at those institutions which relate to the topics included in the Manifold Greatness project. Hands-on research access to rare materials is limited. Scholars and other qualified researchers seeking the opportunity to work with these or other rare books and manuscripts should apply to the library in question.

The King James Bible has such an extensive religious and cultural history that there are almost countless websites that could be listed; this link offers some useful starting points.

This exhibition was made possible by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this exhibition do not necessarily reflect those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.